Guest post by “[Arno] Gourdol confirmed tonight [Flash Player] would get the full WebM support, which also includes the Vorbis audio encoding technology and a container to bundle the data together.[…] ‘We don’t have a timetable for it,’ Gourdol said of WebM support in Flash. Important factors include hardware support, just getting under way today, and broad use of the technology, he said.”
Seems like WebM is becoming the leader, Next Silverlight should have plug-in kinda support.
I want WebM to succeed, but I want flash to die in the most painful way possible.
No, you really don’t. The most painful way to die is slowly…
Except its already happening.
That is what may actually happen, because Flash has a lot of tools which support website creation. The issue of WebM vs H264 video doesn’t really affect this much.
What is needed to supplant Flash is widely-available and sufficiently functional tools for website creation of HTML5/CSS3/SVG/ECMAscript websites (i.e. standards-compliant websites which don’t require Flash but which are just as flashy, if you follow).
Enter BlueGriffon, announced yesterday.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2011/5/prweb8391644.htm
http://www.bluegriffon.org/
IMO, offerings such as BlueGriffon will do far more to hasten the demise of Flash than WebM support in Flash will do to delay that demise.
As a long time web developer, previously HTML/CSS/JavaScript enthusiast – the last thing I want is Flash’s demise. I understand the hatred from Linux users (and OSX users to a lesser extent – though HTML sucked for a long time there too), but developing in HTML5 is garbage compared to Flash development.
That said, Adobe is moving solidly into the app space with AIR, Flash as a platform will be fine – and HTML can linger in it’s perpetually incomplete headache space for all of eternity for all I care (call me bitter).
(I still hold on to a very tiny amount of hope that HTML will one day be complete and competitive as a real app platform – with the current players and games, I really don’t have any expectations for it.)
HTML wasn’t ever meant for that. It was meant to describe a web page’s structure.
A web page should be seen as a document.
Did you know that Adobe’s tools for website development can “write out to” HTML5/CSS3/ECMAscript as well as to Flash?
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/05/adobe-adds-html5-creation-tools-to…
Yeah, I use Dreamweaver daily. Don’t get me started on that crashy unstable hunk of junk! The reality is though, the target platform is incomplete, and doing basic things (like columns) entails hacking some standard (hack the HTML and violate standards and use tables, or hack the CSS float model to create something that kind of works like columns, but not really).
Or you could use Flash and Text Layout Framework, have a WYSIWYG that works, and be done. *sigh* One day.
At least Adobe and others are actively hacking up WebKit to try and improve the situation – someone’s going to mess it all up at the 11th hour though. Call me jaded.
Sounds pretty nice, as a successor to NVU in the WYSIWYG HTML editor family, but I’m not sure if it’s good for coding “real” websites though.
Also, a good competitor to Flash should offer vector animation facilities with good event management, so that Flash games may finally start to get some standards-compliant competition ^^
Doubt it.
It is a nice idea and will be good for basic websites.
Cross browser issues will still plague it and because the author is using a WYSIWYG tool they won’t understand how to fix these issues when they load up the site in another browser (all browsers have rendering issues and bugs).
Also generated markup and CSS is always far from optimal, what about Mobile Devices (mobile web traffic will overtake traditional web traffic in 2014 according to some industry whitepapers).
Also there is no mention of Javascript?
Also Flash isn’t supposed to be used for a whole website.
It is perfect to use on Games and Interactive Content that merge user interaction and video, Charts (though CSS 3.0 and JS can do this incredibly well now) and I am sure there are plenty of use cases that I can’t think of.
Plugins aren’t going away any time soon.
WebM was announced on last year’s Google I/O, and Adobe said they’re committed to supporting it (or at least the VP8 video codec) in Flash player… on last year’s Google I/O.
For something that could shock the nuts out of Apple by making H.264 irrelevant for HTML5 video and potentially endangering iOS video support, Adobe sure is taking their sweet time with this.
That’s what this news is about. Last year Adobe only committed to supporting “VP8”, not “WebM”. Some people (mostly H.264 supporters, admittedly) took this to mean that Flash would only support VP8 in a Flash container, which is not the same as WebM.
Now though Adobe have confirmed that they will support WebM I.e. VP8 and Vorbis in the WebM container. So now there is really very little excuse not to use WebM, given the market penetration of Flash is massive: far, far greater than H.264 only HTML5 browsers.
Adobe doesn’t really compete directly like that. It’s actually kind of funny, the ubiquity of Flash has given them the reputation of a much larger company than they are. The last they want to do is piss off a company the size of Apple (too much).
They said they will support Webm like a thousand years ago.